


double feature

by posteruscometa



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti)
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Anxiety, Eddie Lives, Gen, Richie Tozier & Stanley Uris Are Best Friends, Stan Lives, Trans Richie Tozier, a "fix it fic" if you squint but mostly an excuse to talk about richie and stan, mentioned Eddie/Richie but very vague
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-08
Updated: 2020-08-08
Packaged: 2021-03-06 05:09:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 16,900
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25777942
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/posteruscometa/pseuds/posteruscometa
Summary: “I, uh,” Richie says, and then clears his throat. “I won’t pretend to understand exactly what you’re going through, or what you feel. But, um, I love you. I’m glad you’re here.”Stan’s jaw quivers, and it makes Richie feel like someone is pressing their heel into a spot just below his ribs.“You know it wouldn’t have been the same without you, right?”Stan nods, wiping his eyes and sighing deeply. “I know."(or: Stanley makes it home, and Richie is there to greet him.)
Relationships: Richie Tozier & Stanley Uris
Comments: 6
Kudos: 49





	double feature

**Author's Note:**

> hello! a few things first:  
> 1) **TW for mentions of suicide, and extended talks about suicide idealization.** nothing is graphic, but please keep it in mind!  
> 2) this is purely based off the 2017 + 2019 movies! i know that there's some inconsistencies with the book in here somewhere, but i'm sticking to what i know, since i've never read it.  
> 3) this is my first fic that i've written in over a year, and most definitely the longest. it really means a lot to me, and i put a lot of my heart in here. thank you so much for reading!

It’s one of those days where the sky is almost white with the sun, everything lit up like a movie set, and you wear the heat like a backpack full of rocks until night finally comes. This means it’s the perfect day for Richie and Stan to go to their abandoned school playground and run themselves silly, until heatstroke hits or one of them skins their knees. The playground is the very best like this; the monkey bars sticky with humidity and easy to grasp, no kids to bumble into when Richie and Stan play, and the best swing, the one on the far right, is always open. Richie is on that swing, now, kicking and pumping his legs along with Stan’s sturdy arms pushing him from behind. He’s crowing at the top of the arc, making the most annoying noises he can and laughing when Stan’s monotone voice drifts to his ears, saying he’s acting like a wild animal. When he lets go of the swing, he’s shot forward, arms pinwheeling, and Stan shouts something in a panicked voice, but his feet slam on the ground, crunching on the mulch, doesn’t even fall over, and he dances and hollers in celebration of landing safely.

Stan affords him several slow claps. “Good job,” he says. “Now do me.”

Richie is still riding this high too much to go for the easy crack at that, so he just skips over to where Stan is sitting on the swing, back ramrod straight, waiting to be pushed. Richie doesn’t _push_ as much as _shove_ people on the swing, like he’s trying to throw them off, and while both Bill and Eddie both hate it, Stan is the only one who takes it seemingly out of sheer stubbornness, almost proud that Richie isn’t able to annoy him away.

For a while, this is all they do, this back and forth, Richie sweating through his shirt, his hair damp and sticking to his forehead. It’s so hot and so humid that neither of them complain about their aching arms, their hoarse voices, because despite it all, energy crackles through the air, carried by cicada song, and some distant hopefulness for an ice cream truck to stop by the blacktop. It’s _good._ It feels so rare to have a day like this, and Richie soaks it up.

Stan’s blue-sneakered heels scrape hard at the mulch, his back slamming into an unprepared Richie’s chest, sending him tumbling backwards with a comical _oof_. Surprised, he scrambles up, saying, “Stan, what the hell?! You almost killed me!”

Stan says nothing, his neck turned to look at something past the playground fence, and Richie follows his line of sight to one of the rickety houses surrounding the back of the field. There’s a man on his porch. He’s sloped on his door frame, leaning all his weight to one side. There’s a big, ugly cigar hanging from his mouth, leaking tar colored smoke. Richie can’t see his eyes.

“Hey,” Richie mutters, but doesn’t finish. He can’t see Stan’s face, and wishes he could. The man keeps staring. 

“Do you know this guy?” Richie says, but already knows the answer. Everybody knows everybody in Derry, but some people keep an eye on kids like them. Maybe he does know us, Richie thinks. Maybe he heard the too high pitch of Richie’s voice. Maybe he saw Stan’s kippah.

“We need to go,” Stan says, low and soft.

Richie can’t stop staring. Even from far away, Richie can see him. Watches his lips curl to the side, showing a glimmer of yellow teeth. 

Richie’s stomach drops at the same time Stan jumps off the swing. For one awful second, Richie thinks Stan’s gonna take off and leave him there, caught under the not-gaze of this man, but Stan turns to him, his eyes big, and grabs his arm, pulling without moving. Richie takes off, running next to Stan, arms pumping, telling himself to not look back in case the man can see them. They don’t stop running, even when they’re past the blacktop, on the other side of the school, near the trashcans, even when they’re off school grounds and tearing down the sidewalk, their feet pounding on pavement, even when Richie feels like his lungs are going to explode. They don’t stop running until they’re home, a silent agreement met between them to go to Richie’s parent’s room and watch TV right in the corner, where the air conditioning blows the hardest. But even then, Richie’s heart keeps pounding with the echoes of his footsteps, and the feeling of panic hovers over him the rest of the night, until he’s lying awake in bed with the curtains drawn, shivering. He listens to his heartbeat pulsing in his ears for so long that he wonders if it’s ever going to stop. And when he goes to bed, he finds himself in the same place, still running with the sun bright on his neck. But this time, he’s alone.

\----

The first memory comes after Richie leaves the venue and walks the half mile to his hotel. He does a quick sweep of his (admittedly, very nice, if not severely overpriced) hotel room, grabs his boxers off the floor of the bathroom, and after a pause, takes the tiny bottles of shampoo and conditioner from the shower, shoving them into the pockets of his stupid orange toiletry bag that his manager got him after seeing how he threw things in his suitcase at random to “pack”. He crams them all unceremoniously in his duffel bag and is almost out the door before he catches a glimpse of himself in the mirror. He looks like shit.

“I look like shit,” he mutters. He has huge pit stains under his arms from the trek here, and his shirt is half untucked, and not in a sexy way. He tries to brush his hands over himself, turning his body this way and that, like he can magically slide off the grime that seems to permanently coat his body, and then sighs. “Fine,” he says. “Fine, fine, fine. Fine.”

Richie takes a searing hot shower, and despite feeling urgency deep within his bones, he takes the time to thoroughly clean every inch of himself, pouring generous amounts from the tiny, ridiculously hard to squeeze soap bottle, and lathers himself with it, getting his chest hair all sudsy. He hates showers. He’s always hated showers, he realizes with a start, blinking at the ceiling tile. He liked baths way more, because you could take toys in with you, and Richie would spend his time making his disfigured dinosaur figurines play out sitcom episodes he had caught on the TV before his sister came in and switched the channel. _I’d still dig that now,_ he thinks, bizarrely. _I’d kill for a dinosaur toy to do bits with in the shower._ With a hysterical little laugh, he reaches for the shampoo and conditioner, before realizing he put them in his toiletry bag, and he runs out of the bathroom, cursing the cold air and the stupid decision to shower as he digs through that fucking bag, dripping all over his luggage.

When he's done, he stands in front of the fogged-up mirror, his body red from the heat and from scrubbing, and squints at his blurry reflection. Another memory bubbles to the service, this time, completely out of nowhere, little seven year old Bill and Richie sitting in front of each other at lunch, Bill carefully scribbling on his notepad and looking up at Richie every now and again, because Richie had said he wanted to know what he looked like without glasses on. The picture had looked like shit, obviously, Richie with a big balloon head and tufts of spiky hair, and no nose, but he’d loved it to pieces, and cried when it rained the next day and the picture got soaked in his flimsy backpack. Richie puts his palms up to his eyes, hissing through his teeth, and gets out of the bathroom.

The next memory comes when he’s in the Uber on the way to the airport, sporting the least wrinkled outfit he could find, staring at the black screen of his phone and bouncing his knee. The memories don’t overwhelm him, not really, but it feels like he's a mouse in a maze and his brain is feeding him little pieces of cheese to lead to the exit, making him feel both sick and excited, excited in a way he hasn’t felt in years. He was at synagogue during one of the only times his parents insisted that he go with his ancient grandparents for some holiday, and he keeps bouncing in place, which makes the old chair he’s in squeak. He looks across the room and catches Stan’s eye ( _Stanley!_ Richie thinks, bright and delighted), and Stan raises an eyebrow. Richie makes some stupid gesture with his hands, probably gross and crude, and Stan turns his whole body in a slow movement away from him that makes Richie snort so loud, his grandpa smacks his leg with his cane. The memory makes Richie bite the inside of his cheek to stop himself from expressing some frantic, unknown emotion that flares in his chest.

Richie does a pretty great job of keeping it all down until he’s on the actual airplane, still bouncing his knee and staring out the window. The memory he’s met with, this time, is almost comically miserable—his nose is gushing blood like a fountain from some Bowers-related fender bender, and Eddie is chewing him out, as if it’s somehow _his_ fault that Bowers kneed him in the face, and Mike is trying to both simultaneously help Richie plug his nose and convince Eddie to shut up, because lunch ended twenty minutes ago and they’re all supposed to be in class right now, and if they don’t hurry up they’re going to get in trouble. Ben, of course, comes back into the boys bathroom with Bev in tow, and she can’t stop laughing at the sight of them long enough to help Richie, so he had to spend the rest of the day with dried blood on his shirt, feeling sick and thirsty and miserable. This is just about all that Richie can currently take at three-thirty in the morning, and he bursts out laughing, echoing in the quiet, dark plane, despite the dirty looks from the onlookers. He can’t seem to stop, and it feels overwhelming in a way he can’t place, because he hasn’t laughed this hard in years. He’s so fucking excited and terrified to see them all. It’s going to be great.

\----

Beverley and Ben are the first people he sees at the restaurant, and he parks his rental car and bounds out to meet them, slowing to a casual walk when he realizes he looks like a fucking lunatic. He recognizes them right away, some kid instinct he’s relearned since the phone call, and feels both delighted and embarrassed when they both recognize him too, but not without looking him up and down for a second, first. Richie shoves himself between them, and the reality of being next to them again makes him feel like he’s standing on solid ground for the first time in sixteen hours.

“Do we know if anyone else is here?” Richie asks after long hugs are exchanged, craning his neck to look around. “Or are we the only ones who bothered to show?” 

Ben smiles in that same way he did when he was a kid, eyes soft around the edges, and takes out his phone. “Here’s what Mikey said,” he says, flashing him and Bev the text (“Inside, waiting for u all. – Mike”). “Not sure who all is in there besides him, though.”

“God, wouldn’t it be sad if it was just the four of us that showed,” Richie sighed. “Just Mike and Ben talking about the meaning of flowers or some shit while me and Bev smoke a joint in the back.”

Ben laughs and Bev rolls her eyes, shaking her head. “Oh, _please,_ Richie, at the very least Mikey would absolutely bum off of us. Ben, though, I’m not sure.” She turns to him, smiling widely. “You still on that anti-drug kick from all those Saturday morning cartoons you watched?”

“Oh, right!” Richie says. “Remember when he made that drawing for the newspaper competition? With the little D.A.R.E slogan and everything?” He clasps his hands together. “Our little straight-edger.”

“He got so nervous when you and I started smoking, you remember?”

“’Guys, you gotta stop, this wood is so old, what if the embers make the whole thing go up, golly gee,’” Richie parrots in a purposefully poor approximation of a gentle-voiced Hanscom. He nudges Ben’s shoulder to make it clear he’s kidding, and Ben rubs the back of his neck, his face red but looking pleased. He opens his mouth to say something else, but Bev turns around and says “Oh!” in a startled voice. 

When Richie and Ben turn to look, they see a figure getting out of a stuffy green car, slamming the door, and when a phone screen illuminates their face Richie realizes that, of course, it’s Stan. Of course. He feels his whole body light up, physically _feels_ it, and is suddenly plunged back to his parent's old house, where he’d press himself against the window and wait for Stan to get dropped off, bounce up and down once he saw a stone-faced Stan walk formally to the door and greet his parents in the same polite way he always did, and always would. He giggles a little, face hurting from smiling.

“Stan!” Ben calls, waving one ridiculously big arm, and Stan looks up, his face expressionless, and turns off his phone, strutting carefully into the neon lights outside the restaurant. He somehow looks exactly like how Richie thought he would look like, in some way he can’t put his finger on; little circular glasses with wire frames, hair dark but still flopping over one eye, blue shirt buttoned all the way up to the collar, tucked into his neatly pressed pants. He cocks his head, giving them all a once over.

“Ben,” he states, pointing at Ben. “Beverly, Richie?” He finishes, directing his finger at the other two.

“You got it,” Richie says. “Man, it would’ve been really embarrassing if you had gotten it wrong. Were you just guessing? It looked like you were guessing.”

Stan raises his eyebrow at Richie, and he can’t help but laugh. He goes in with his hand out to Ben, and Ben only smiles, patting his shoulder gently as they shake, and when he does the same to Bev, she says “Seriously? It’s been, what, thirty years, and you can’t stomach giving us a hug?”, and he rolls his eyes and gives her a quick one, kissing the side of her face affectionately. 

When he turns to Richie, he folds his arms, looking him over for a minute. The smile drifts from his face, and he squares his shoulders instinctively. “What is it, Stanley, are you judging me already?” he asks clumsily. “I promise I’m hotter when Thing 1 and Thing 2 aren’t here ruining my spotlight.”

He doesn’t even finish his bad joke before Stan is hugging him, squeezing his sides and burying his face into his shoulder. Richie makes a noise of surprise, and pats his back a few times, before wrapping his arms around him and squishing his nose against his shoulder. He had a whole thing planned out, he thinks, where he was going to say some lame inside joke from when they were teenagers, he thought it up the whole car ride here, but this was probably better.

Stan pulls back, clearing his throat and adjusting his glasses by the feet, and straightens his back. “Do we know what we’re ordering?” He asks, voice all business. “I looked at the menu on the plane ride here. Yahoo says they have a wonderful wine selection.”

\----

The food is sub-par, the air smells like eggs, and the poor waitress comes in about three times to ask if they’re ready for the check, and each time somebody has something else they wanted to get, and it’s the fucking best. They’re all talking over one another until their voices are raised to shouts, and even when they quiet down it’s broken by one of them, usually Eddie, yelling at them to speak up, they’re all the way across the fucking table, how can you expect anyone to hear when you’re chewing your food like that, too. Richie hugs everyone at least three times when the initial greetings begin, qualifying this night as the most human touch he’s had since freshman year of college, and even then people tend to swap seats or lean into each other’s spaces, like they’re soaking each other up. And they are, really, they’re so thrilled, all of them, the energy is humming through the room with it. 

Stan, after complaining about the seating arrangement the second he stepped within the door and saw all the seats taken but one, still sits between Richie and Eddie, something that Richie is severely grateful for, because he desperately needs a physical barrier between him and Eddie right now, thank you very much. Stan’s presence does not stop Richie and Eddie from leaning behind or in front of Stan to yell and gesture wildly at one another, nor does it stop Richie from calling for a refill of his drink twice before they’ve even ordered, but it’s welcome nonetheless. Stan, ever the Mature One, attempts to keep his voice level but ends up talking over everyone anyway, raising his chopsticks higher and higher whenever he wanted to make a point, and Mike, as always, is the only one who gets him to really laugh out loud. He and Richie spend half the dinner leaning into each other, talking in low voices about how everyone looks, about the food, about how Bill keeps fluttering his eyelashes at Beverley and she keeps pretending not to notice, about how Mike keeps looking over everyone and forgetting to eat, just smiling at them all. When they laugh, Richie slaps the table and Stan pushes his shoulder and chastises him, sipping his water to hide the fact that he’s smiling. 

Richie notices little things about all of them that he doesn’t think the others realize they’re doing, and it feels like a superpower he didn’t know he had—something he never did through all of their years apart with anyone else. Bev keeps going for her left hand, and stopping, looking down at her fingers quietly before she looks up with a small smile. Stan announces that he’s texting his wife every time his screen lights up, and focuses intently on his phone, using both hands to type out a paragraph long message every time. Mike and Ben still eat all their meals with their napkins neatly in their laps. Eddie orders chicken breast and plain rice, eating them slowly and without comment, which weirdly makes Richie want to burst into tears, so he finishes his drink with a slam of his glass on the table and makes some asinine comment about something else instead. 

When he raises his hand for a third refill of the night, Stan smacks his hand down. Richie opens his mouth, ready to tell him off, but the look he gives him is so Stan-like, furrowed eyebrows, mouth quirked to one side, looking disappointed and firm, that Richie relents, muttering something as he steals Stan’s water glass instead, just to annoy him.

\----

Richie’s still awake by the time all the other Losers retire to their rooms, sitting in one of the bar stools. He keeps messing with his jacket, zipping the zipper up and down, rustling the fabric, and he keeps stopping because he swears he hears Eddie or Bill chewing him out for it, and even though they’re not there right now he knows they’re upstairs, and it makes him smile a little. The Inn is quiet, the thick curtains drawn, little lamps and candles sitting on small tables around the main area being the only source of light. It makes Richie feel like he’s being tucked in under a thick quilt, but he’s not tired.

When he hears feet creaking down the stairs, he doesn’t turn, hoping that whoever it is will just leave him looking miserable like this, or will at least kill him quickly. But it’s just Mike, who sees Richie and smiles, walking over to him with his hands in his back-jean pockets. 

“You heading out, man?” Richie asks.

“Yeah, gonna try to get a decent night’s sleep.” Mike gives him a little look. “You should try that, too, you know.”

“What, the whole sleeping thing? Nah, overrated. I tried it once in my twenties, and let me tell you, it was not that good. Much better to watch the same Netflix shows I always watch until sleep takes me by force.”

Mike smiles. “I don’t even have Netflix.”

“You’re fucking with me.”

“No, I promise, I’m not! I don’t even know when it came out, people just started talking about it, and suddenly now it’s this _thing_ and just…ahh, I don’t know, it seems overrated.”

“One, you’re such a fucking hipster, and two, get Netflix, please, God, that is literally so sad. I have a comedy special on it, it’s terrible, and if you don’t see it I’m going to be severely disappointed in you.”

Mike laughs, his voice warm as honey, and it makes him look so much younger than when he’s talking intensely about how to kill the clown. It makes Richie forget any agitation he felt towards him before, makes him wonder why he even felt any agitation at all, toward this person he loved so much. “Well, now I have to get it,” he says, and Richie knows that he really is going to get Netflix, because of Richie’s bullshit comedy show on it, and he smiles. 

“Get some sleep, Mikey,” he says, saluting him. “We’ll see you tomorrow.”

Mike hugs him one more time before he leaves, and Richie doesn’t even make some self-aggrandizing comment, just pats his back and waves goodbye as he goes. 

It’s only a few seconds later that Richie hears someone else coming down the stairs, and he turns this time, ready for it to be an actual killer this time. But it’s Stan, in a worn-out shirt that looks like he’s had it since he was a teenager and fraying sweatpants. He looks only half awake, his glasses off and his hair tussled. 

“Hey, Stanley,” he says. “Come sit down with me, we can have a sleepover.”

“It’s already a sleepover,” Stan replies, “We’re all in the same house, just in different rooms. It’s literally already a big sleepover.”

“No, man, it’s not a sleepover unless Eddie’s on an air mattress on someone’s floor and wakes you up in your bed in the middle of the night to tell you he needs to sleep in the bed because he’s scared he’ll get a cold from the vents.”

Stan actually snickers at that, and Richie grins. “I can’t believe I remember that,” Stan says. “Do you remember when Sonia would have to stay over at the house if Eddie was staying there, and she’d complain the whole time, and then at night she’d peak her head in through the cracked door and stare in to watch us sleep for several minutes?”

Richie groans and flings his head back. “Oh my _God,_ don’t remind me. She used to give me nightmares as a kid. Everything we ever did with Eddie was like a secret mission, I swear. We had to take the long route to town just in case one of her like, two friends was out there and was spying for her, and even then Eddie would still lose his mind if we interacted with any person in public.” 

Stan shakes his head, his smile fading. “It was awful. If it was today, my parents would’ve called CPS.”

Richie cringes a little. “Yeesh. Way to make it dark, Staniel.” 

“It’s true, and you know it. The way she talked to us, especially Mike, and Bev, and you, too.” He frowns, staring at the wall above the bar, looking distant. “The way she talked to Eddie, too.”

Richie knows. He felt it in the parking lot when he watched Eddie call his wife, explaining that he was on a business trip he forgot to tell her about and would be back within the week, looking haggard and exhausted, but his voice still high and soft, his eyes still big with a panic he seemed to have permanently inside him since birth. It reminded him of how Eddie used to persuade his mother on the phone to stay over at one of their houses when they were little, pleading as he twisted the phone cord around his little finger. It was something Richie had wondered if Eddie had lost with time, but was not surprised when he saw it in action again all those years later. When Eddie had hung up, he’d looked at Richie like he was daring him to say something, but Richie had just shrugged and gotten in his own car, staring at the steering wheel for five minutes before finally driving off. 

He sat there feeling sick for a moment before clearing his throat, jostling his knee. “Do you remember how hard he tried to convince his mom I had been a boy the whole time?" he says, switching tactics, "And that she’d just misremembered that old friend of his from second grade? Truly a little soldier, but, you know Sonia. She's a sly dog.” He snorts. “I don’t even remember how she found out, but I’ll never forget coming over to his house one time and her giving me this shitty, smug look, not even saying anything, just grinning like the fucking Cheshire cat over her soaps.”

Stan scoffed. “I don’t think it’s that funny.”

“Well, it’s _my_ traumatizing childhood memory, and _I_ get to decide if it’s funny or not, which it is. Do you remember when Eddie brought one of his old white button ups that he hid to tell his mom he lost, and gave it to me?” He smiled a little, pressing his fist to his mouth. “He taught me how to tie a tie for the first time."

Richie was eleven, and it was at one of the school formals that the kids were required to go to at least twenty minutes of before their parents picked them up. He didn’t bother telling his parents that he needed and extra set of clothes, or that it was happening at all, and had anticipated hiding under the bleachers the whole time and looking for old condoms, when Eddie had dragged him to the boys bathroom and pulled out the world’s most wrinkled white button up. He told Richie that he could pay him back by giving him all the sour stuff from their next Halloween haul, and tied his tie for him as he poorly narrated it, saying that knowing how to wear a tie was essential in becoming a man. Richie had stared at him the whole time.

When he looked over, back in the present day, and saw that Stan was looking at him strangely, he felt his stomach drop.

“Oh, don’t,” he said, at the same time Stan said, “Can I ask you something?”

Richie sighed, gritting his teeth. “Sure. Sure, I guess.”

Stan waited a moment, still looking at him, before saying, “Are you still in love with Eddie?”

Richie physically recoiled, leaning away from Stan in his chair. Whatever he had expected the question to be, it wasn’t fucking _that._

“How did you,” Richie starts. “I didn’t even know you…” And he stops, because of course Stan knew. 

Stan’s expression changes, furrowing his eyebrows a little, his mouth slanting, and Richie looks away, squeezing his eyes shut. If there’s one thing he can’t stand from anyone, it’s pity. Especially from Stan. Especially over _this._

“I’m sorry,” Stan said, his voice soft. “I shouldn’t have said that.”

Richie shakes his head, again and again. He had been talking himself through this since he got here, since he stepped into the restaurant and saw Eddie, lit up green by the aquarium in the back, pointing at one of the little fish swimming around the rocks. He’d hoped it had gone away, hope that he’d stomped it out, twenty-seven years have passed, anyway, it was just an embarrassing secret. What was even more embarrassing, what was _mortifying,_ was discovering it was still a secret he had to keep, and that keeping it felt like he was trying to stop a dam from overflowing, because he felt like his traitorous feelings were leaking out of him every time he remembered that Eddie was in the room. 

But Stan didn’t say anything. He didn’t need to, of course, because Richie knew what he was thinking already. It had always been like that. He rubbed his hand across Richie’s back, while Richie pressed his palms into his eyes, taking deep breaths through his teeth. He didn’t say anything the rest of the night.

\----

“So,” Stan says, cutting into the quiet, dry air, “It’s obviously a given that we’re not splitting up.”

Everyone turns to look at him. Bill, particularly, looks offended, like this shouldn’t even be a question, much less one to ask him, the Superior Leader of the group. “O-ob-ob-obviously,” Bill mutters.

“Because I don’t know if anyone _else_ remembers what happened last time,” Stan continues, “But when we got more than two feet apart from one another, Eddie broke his arm.”

“And then that other time, you almost got killed,” Eddie mutters. Ben shoots him a look, and Eddie shrugs, his eyebrows shooting up his forehead. “It’s true!”

Bill sighs, dramatically. “Yeah, I remember, we all almost d-d-died down there, Stan.”

“So that means we should _definitely_ stick together,” Ben cuts in, ever the peacemaker. “Makes it easier. We don’t need to cover more ground, we just need to get back down to the sewers, right, Mike?”

Mike is looking more serious than Richie has ever seen him, looking around the house in anticipation. He blinks, as if processing that he’s been addressed, and nods. “For this to work, we need to all be together,” he says, repeating what he’s been saying all day. 

“And for us all to be safe,” says Ben gently, touching Mike’s shoulder. Mike softens a little, looking more like himself, and nods. 

They move together, quietly (or as quietly as seven grown adults can), like a herd of penguins, and try to assess the situation as much as they can and be alert while keeping a steady path forward. Bill suddenly pushes himself ahead, striding forward, and Richie groans out loud.

“Fucking Christ, Bill, come back, seriously,” Richie calls, and it practically shakes the dust and cobwebs off of the rafters. 

“B-but It’s down here, I thought,” Bill calls, stepping into another side room. 

“Damn it,” Richie hisses as he pushes ahead, too, trying to grab Bill before he goes off on one of his missions that he’s been suddenly taking to doing. When he pushes the door open, he sees Bill surveying the area, and turns his flashlight on Richie, looking annoyed. 

“I’m sure there’s an entrance h-h-here,” Bill says, jutting his chin forward, and that’s about all Richie’s fried nerves can take.

“Dude, what the fuck has been your problem today?” He snaps, folding his arms.

Bill raises his eyebrows. “Are you seriously asking me that? What do you _think_ is my 'f-f-fucking problem' today?”

“Yeah, I’m serious, like, we’re all stressed here, I get it, this is scary and whatever, but nobody else is being a professional asshole today like you are.”

“Oh, really? Because it seems like you’re doing a pretty good job of earning that title, right now.”

Richie knows this is petty, really, if not completely childish, and he knows he’s picking fights because he’s tired, and scared out of his fucking mind, but he really doesn’t care. He opens his mouth to argue, before Stan and Eddie come in, looking annoyed in almost hilariously similar ways (drawn eyebrows, slanted mouth).

“Are you guys seriously in here fighting?” asks Stan, and for some reason him saying that annoys Richie even more. 

“We’re not fighting,” he says, and he knows how childish it sounds, and what a bad lie it clearly is, but he’d feel even dumber if Stan was here to referee this argument, and he just wants it to be done. 

“No, Richie is just acting like a f-f-fucking child,” Bill mutters. 

“Fuck you,” Richie snaps. “I’m gonna go hang out with Mike and Bev and Ben, at least they’re not gonna be dicks about this.” He’s hardly finished his sentence before the door slams in front of him, making him jump five feet in the air. 

“Shit,” is what he says, eloquently. 

The temperature in the room drops, just like that, as easy as flipping a switch. Bill and Eddie leap into action, pushing past Richie to pound on the door, yelling for Mike or Ben, and Richie just stands there. His frustration paralyzes him to the point where the only thing he can think of is how rich it was for Bill to try to break them out of a room he led them all into, and that’s what he’s about to open his big, stupid mouth to say when he hears the fridge rumble.

The pounding and yelling stops, and the three of them turn around. Stan is staring at the fridge with wide eyes, not six feet away from it. The fridge rumbles again, and the door swings open, revealing arms, legs and torso folded in on each other, squeezed inside the rotting interior.

The reality of the situation hits him like a brick, and he realizes that Bill was absolutely correct, that he was a fucking child, that this was somehow his fault, just like that last summer, where he pushed and pushed until it severed the group, and now his big stupid mouth going is going to get them all actually, really physically severed. Richie breathes in and holds it, watches the pile of limbs and skin quiver. A head rolls out, tumbling out on the floorboards with a sick thud, and Stan jumps to the right to get out of its way. When it slows to a stop, it rolls and tilts, like a bowling pin just before it falls, and Richie sees that it’s _Stan._

Richie looks, robotically, to his right, because he knows that it’s not true, knows that Stan is right there, and he is. He’s staring at his own molded, rotten head, eyes wide, and pressing his fists to his mouth like he’s holding something in him. The head makes a slick, wet noise as it turns itself, to look right at Stan with pale, dead eyes.

“If it wasn’t for you,” it says in Stan’s voice, “I’d still be alive, Bill.”

Stan gags, so loud that Richie can hear it, and the head shivers. It turns to look at Richie, then, and Richie can only stand there, mouth agape. “Richie, what’s happening to me?” It whines, and the holes in it’s face erupt, hairy, awful legs forcing itself outward, monstrous, and long, as the head screams in pain. 

After a moment of stillness, it launches itself across the room, attacking Eddie’s legs, getting kicked across the room, a flurry of action and a mix of monstrous and human noises. Richie leaps backward as it launches itself at Stan, and Stan makes a noise Richie has never heard before, high and sharp, his whole body jerking as he kicks and sends the head flying, bouncing off the wall an out of the window of the room. When Richie turns to look at where Stan was, he’s not there, and his brain shifts to look at Eddie instead, Eddie who is shivering in the corner of the room.

“Eddie,” he gasps, his mind working on autopilot, stumbling toward him. “Are you okay?”

In what feels like one awful moment, one split second, the head is suddenly on him, attaching itself to Richie’s face, scrambling at him with it’s terrible legs, with the smell of it’s molded and rotting skin filling Richie’s nostrils. What’s so awful, though, is that it’s Stan’s face that it’s wearing, Stan’s face that is mutated and twisted to reveal drooling fangs, spittle flying from it’s mouth, Stan who is laughing at how it’s fangs are so close to Richie’s face, so close to tearing him to pieces. He screams louder and longer than he’s ever screamed in his life, and he hears Bill screaming something too, just above him, and the _head_ is howling so loudly it’s burning Richie’s eardrums, and it’s all noise and noise and noise, until he hears a loud, almost cartoonish _thunk_ right above the thing’s head, and he watches the head go limp.

He hears the noise again, and again, and again, and hears a loud, high scream, like a wounded animal, and Richie has the stupid thought that it sounds like there's a fucking wolf or something in Neibolt with them, but when the head rolls off it’s Stanley, the _real_ Stanley. He’s holding a blunt knife and his eyes are wild, his glasses gone, tears streaming down his face as his mouth curls into a snarl. He kicks the head, hard, sending it flying against the opposite room, and doesn’t take his eyes off it until it slides away, giving a putrid little smile and skittering off. 

The next few minutes slide by in an awful haze, of Bill screaming in Eddie’s face, and Richie, still on the ground, saying things he doesn’t remember saying, thinking hazily _Don’t yell at him, Big Bill, I would’ve taken the hit for him any day,_ and he sees Beverly and Ben and Mike come in, and poor Bevy is almost in tears, looking down at him. When Richie sits up, after the commotion has slowed, knowing that it’s time to go, he looks for Stan. He’s picking up his glasses off the floor, adjusting them on his face, and when he turns around, Richie sees that they’re cracked down the right lens. 

“Stupid fucking knockoff,” Richie croaks. “It called you Bill.”

Stan shakes his head, rubbing his eyes. “No, it didn’t. It was talking to me.”

Richie gets up, stumbles toward Stan, and, after a moment, presses a hand to his shoulder. Stan closes his eyes and shakes his head.

“I’m sorry,” Stan whispers.

“You didn’t do anything,” Richie says. “It’s not your fault.”

“It is, though,” Stan says, and leaves it there, hanging above them. 

\----

When Richie is in the deadlights, he watches Eddie. He sees him come home from work to his one-story house, to the couch with plastic covering on it, to sit across from the table and make mindless small talk with his wife. He watches Eddie take the long way home, take the back roads that go through bundles of neighborhoods, construction zones, farmers markets, until it’s coincidentally 9:30, when he knows she’ll be asleep. He watches the two of them lie to each other, in the practiced way people do when they lie compulsively, constantly--about work, about her friends, about his medication, about her family, about his family. He watches Eddie lay flat on his back on the twin bed across from his wife and stare at the ceiling, and watches him get up at 6 in the morning to clean his nails, get out the secret clear polish that he keeps in the cabinet, behind all the old medicine bottles, because he’s petrified that if she finds it, she’ll think something is wrong with him. He watches Eddie die, in the passive way you watch things happen on TV; watching images come in and out of focus, following the camera with his eyes. He watches Eddie die, again and again, and he knows, instinctively, that Stan is dead, too, feels his absence, feels it cold in the air around him. He knows, also, that he’s dead, too, nothing left in him. Richie thinks that if Stan and Eddie are dead, then he’s okay with being dead, too, because he thinks that knowing they used to be alive is a much worse fate than forgetting they existed.

When he’s dropped back down, Eddie miraculously, amazingly alive, running his beautiful mouth and beaming at him, telling him that _I got it, I killed It,_ Richie is so happy that he never has to watch Eddie eat microwaved casserole again that he yanks him close, closer than he’d ever dared, and when It’s claw snaps forward and sinks itself deep into Eddie’s side, Richie, bafflingly, feels only relieved.

\----

So, they kill the clown together, and Richie should be grateful, should be ecstatic. He screams his heart out at this extraterrestrial idiot who ruined his life not once, but twice, he watches Stan, his eyes aflame, deny It’s existence, express his disgust at its logic defying nature, spit in It’s face. He watches Mike and Bill rip the heart right out of him, he gets to feel It crumbling through his clenched fist, gets to know that lifetimes of hurt and death are falling through their fingers, never to be seen again. But when he runs back to Eddie, holding the back of his neck, and sees his eyes closed, and he realizes that he doesn’t remember hearing Eddie’s voice with theirs, that his body is limp, he knows it wasn’t worth it. Richie shakes him, presses him close, tries to feel his breath, too panicked to find his heartbeat. With his frantic scrambling at his body, the rest of them can only stand there, try and fail to bring Richie back. 

“Richie, honey,” Bev says, and Richie wants to tear his throat out of his body, wants to destroy himself right in front of them, he’s already doing it anyway, because he knows what she’s going to say. 

He shakes his head, again and again. “We have to get him out,” he says, voice sounding nothing like himself. “We need to get him out of here.”

They all stand there, still panting and shell shocked, and Richie wants to kick his feet and throw a tantrum right there. Some part of him knows that maybe if Richie would stop having a fucking _meltdown_ in front of them, he could congregate them enough to gather their exhaustive, combined strength to leave here with Eddie alive, but he can't stop. “We can't just _leave_ him here," he croaks out, head snapping towards Ben. "Help me! Come on, help me get him up!”

Ben stands there, at a loss. Richie does scream, this time, in frustration. He can’t bear to look at them all, standing there with such sad looks on their faces, because now they _know,_ how could they not, with Richie turned inside out like this, his heart finally on the outside, like a big, ugly bruise, for everyone to gawk at. 

Bill, responsible Bill, Big Bill, the only one who would play on the playground with Richie in kindergarten, who told the bullies that Richie was one of the boys, who listened and told stories better than anyone, takes Richie by the shoulder, and says, “Richie, he’s gone,” and he almost bursts out laughing, the sheer awfulness of everything that’s happened in the past forty-eight hours looping around the bend and becoming hysterical. Richie opens his mouth to say something, maybe just scream, but is interrupted by Stan shouldering past Ben and Bill.

He kneels by Richie, loops an arm around Eddie’s neck and his waist. Stan looks at Richie through cracked lenses. “Help me,” he says, all business as always. 

“Guys, he’s _gone,_ ” Bill says, with such genuine desperation that Richie starts crying again. He hasn’t cried like that since he was a little boy, and it’s just as terrible as it was then, full bodied sobs raking his beaten ribs. He gets snot all over poor Eddie’s shirt, and he feels so terrible for it, knows how much Eddie would hate it, but he can’t do anything other than cry harder. Rocks tumble several feet away from them, crashing against the pillars of It's birthplace.

“We—” Stan grunts, bending his knees to better take Eddie’s weight. “—are not leaving him down here. We don’t have the time to check for a pulse, and if he _is_ dead, we are not fucking leaving him down here.”

“Stan, we don’t have the time!” Bill shouts, and he’s crying, too, face smeared with dirt and jaw quivering. “We need to go!”

Stan snaps his head up, eyes fierce and bright. “If it was you, Eddie would carry you up. He would yell at us all until we brought you up, and you know it. You fucking know it, and don’t pretend like you don’t.”

Beverly is the one who speaks up, then, eyes hardening. "Bill, he's right. They're both right. We have to get him out of here no matter what. If there's any chance of him not being--" she visibly swallows, blinking hard. "We can't do anything for him down here," she finishes. "We have to get him out."

Ben nods, too, his lip quivering, and Mike squares his shoulders, breathing out hard. "Stan and Richie, carry Eddie out," he says, voice shaking slightly. "Ben, take the back while Bill and Bev stay in front of them. I know the way out." He says it with such confidence that it lights a flame in them, bursting them into action with the last energy they have in their beaten bodies. 

They scramble out of the cave, running as fast as they all collectively can, rocks tumbling around them quicker than before. Ben keeps his hand on Richie’s shoulder, both pushing him forward and keeping him upright. Richie’s glasses are so blurred from fog and dirt and tears that he can only be grateful to be guided somewhere, especially with Eddie half-leaning on his shoulder, head lolling. They make their way uphill, hands grasping at rocks and scraping legs, squeezing through a small exit that they saw once before. As the cave makes another roaring noise behind them, Richie’s knees burning, Mike shouts something, and a second later Richie is blinded by the first ray of sunlight he’s seen in what feels like all of his life. They all stumble forward, their limbs seemingly combined together in a mass of sweat and skin, all holding onto each other, and when Richie feels a boulder crash just behind him, he’s truly positive that they are going to die.

But they don’t die. They come bursting from the underbelly of Neibolt, the entire building moaning and creaking, the stair railings falling over and the world splintering under their feet. They collapse on the pavement just past the fence, slamming against the ground, and they watch together as Neibolt crumbles in on itself. Richie expects it to last longer, expects to have every detail imprinted in his mind, but really, it’s gone in one loud, long moment, glass shattering and metal tumbling together, like a clap of thunder, and over just as fast. 

It’s only a moment of silence, more of a lack of sound than anything else, before Mike collapses in on them all, pressing himself to Richie’s back and grasping at Ben’s arms, and they all fall into each other. Ben presses himself to Bev’s shoulder as she leans into Mike’s side, and Mike’s other arm grasps at Bill, whose gasping sobs ring loud in Richie’s ears. Stan shoves his face inelegantly into Richie’s shoulder, squishing his nose, and Richie collapses into himself, holding Eddie to his chest. It feels like there’s no separation between them, like they’re all one muddled person, bursting to the brim with emotion, taking each other’s pain as their own. 

“Richie,” says Stan, breaking the silence. Richie looks at him, blearily, and Stan’s eyes are wide. 

“What,” says Richie, voice hoarse, and he stops, because he doesn’t need to ask. He feels it.

“What?” asks Mike, voice soft, and Ben leans in between them.

“Eddie,” Stan says. “He’s breathing.”

\----

The ride to the hospital is humiliating, made even worse by the fact that everybody is being so _nice_ to him. Ben doesn’t make fun of Richie when he has to physically restrain him from leaping into the ambulance, and Bev doesn’t complain when Richie smears snot all over her bare shoulders. Nobody says anything when Richie curls himself up against the window of Mike’s ancient car and alternates between shivering and crying on the glass, and all five of them lead him out of the car when they get there, surrounding him in a semi-circle as they speed walk to the entrance. When people gape at them all as they come in, an entertaining sight for a town this small, Stan struts forward, chin jutting out, and checks them in. It takes a while for him to stop crying, and even when he says that it’s okay, that it’s alright, he’s just being stupid, none of the others let go. He knows that the rest of them are just as shattered and panicked, and even in his state he instinctively holds the others when they cry, too, but they do a hell of a good job at pretending to be stable when they’re directly facing him. He’s uncomfortable and terrified at needing people like this, but he loves them all so much it almost doesn’t matter.

Hours slide by, and the buzz that surrounded their arrival fades as the night creeps upon the hospital. They all take turns going to the bathrooms to wash up, Bev going in first and taking the longest—all of them except for Richie and Stan, who sit next to each other, sticky and smelling awful. Both Ben and Mike try to coax Stan up, but he shakes his head, his arms folded, his knee jostling. They don’t talk much. The only time Stan says anything is when he’s calling his wife, telling her he’s okay, that he needs to help his family out back at home for a while, he’ll be back soon. Mike asks Bill if he wants to call his wife, too, but Bill shrugs with one shoulder and Mike wisely drops the subject.

Eventually, the others go through several rounds of an emotional roller coaster, spilling out after being kept boarded up all day. Ben cries almost as much as Richie does, albeit not as dramatic and grossly, and Mike and Bev sometimes look like they're not even in the same room as the rest of them, staring at ceiling tiles until someone takes their hand and tries to bring them down to earth, just a little. Bill is stone faced and slumped in his chair until he eventually cracks about two hours into their wait, weeping into his knees, apologies bubbling out of his mouth in frantic, high whimpers, sorry that he said they should leave Eddie, sorry that he split up the group, sorry that he got them all involved at all. The six of them must look ridiculous, taking turns hovering around each other when one of them starts to cry or panic again, one or two people splitting off to get water or tissues like they're apart of some big working organism, keeping the whole system intact. Eventually, somewhere around two in the morning, sleep takes the rest of the Losers, one by one. Even then, in the cramped hospital chairs, the air stale and the atmosphere broken by scuffling of shoes and beeping monitors, they sleep stacked together and uninterrupted, just like they did in the clubhouse, all those years ago. Richie does not sleep. He doesn’t think he’d be able to, even if he tried.

For the first time in over an hour, he looks up at Stan. His profile is much sharper than it was when they were kids, he thinks; now Stan is all jawline and cheekbones, sharp long nose, like a birds beak. He can tell his teeth are clenched, and his shoulders are squared. He’s taken off his cardigan to give to Bev, and his arms are wiry and firm, the look of someone who doesn’t purposefully work out but did, maybe, at one point. His eyes are the same, a smooth, pale green, like a stone from a river. Richie feels more like a person just knowing he’s there.

“Mike sleeps like an old man,” Richie says, his voice off, almost gone from the screaming. When Stan doesn’t immediately look, he nudges his shoulder and points. It’s only half true—he’s sleeping with his hands folded on his stomach, his head tilted back, legs slightly spread, but his resting face shows a handsome man, one without a semi-permanent furrowed brow, one with dimples and smile lines around his forehead. It makes Richie feel warm inside.

“Don’t do that,” Stan says, and Richie can hear him rolling his eyes.

“Don’t do what?”

“Don’t try to be all coy after you display emotion. I hate when you do that.”

Richie hisses through his teeth. “Damn, you’ve got me all figured out again? I’d hoped maybe you'd forgotten the tried and true ways of the Richie Tozier Breakdown.”

“Well, it’s not like it ever bothered you,” Stan sniffs. “We’re basically brothers, anyway.”

For the first time maybe all day, Richie smiles. It makes his lip split, his tongue tasting blood, but it doesn’t matter. “Aw, Stanley. You think we’re like brothers?”

He sees Stan roll his eyes, now. “Oh, please. Like that was ever an out of pocket statement. I’ve known you our entire lives, and you mine.”

“Yeah, well, our entire lives and one twenty-seven year gap.”

“Do you _really_ think we’ve all changed that much for that to matter,” Stan says, as a statement, not a question.

“No,” Richie says. “But it still matters. I don’t like that I went through my whole adult life not knowing about my family.”

Stan’s face softens. Richie doesn’t bother trying to blunder through some correcting statement about how they’re his _found_ family, or his best friends, or whatever. He knows Stan will just shoot it down, anyway. Stan and Eddie were probably the ones that knew the most about Richie’s family, and it was something the three of them never talked about, but they still knew to keep to themselves, anyway. Ben would sometimes ask why Richie’s parents didn’t come to school stuff, or why Richie walked and biked everywhere, never taking a car, and Richie would say some snarky, mean spirited excuse that made him feel bad every time, but it was enough to make him stop asking about it. Stan and Eddie were the only ones who had ever been to Richie’s house together, and only because Stan’s parents wanted them out and Bill was off on that lake trip with his family. Richie had sat them down on the couch, where his mother sat opposite of them in one of their old, uncomfortable chairs, and he had re-introduced them, saying that these were the kids that he played with all the time, who he went trick or treating with, who he used his allowance to buy birthday gifts for, you must remember Stanley, at least, who used to have play-dates with him every Friday. Once Richie had rambled on long enough even for him, he’d puttered to a stop, looking at his mother. His mother had turned her body to look at Stan, and told him about her day at work. Stan had sat there obediently as she told him about the annoyances of people at her job, the paper jamming in the printer, the ink tray never coming out enough, and then she had gotten up and walked to the kitchen. It was fine, Richie said to them when they went to his room, and he didn’t want to talk about it. Richie never went hungry, or got hit, or disowned when he came out or anything, so really, it wasn’t that bad. It was just a difficult relationship. Really, he was one of the lucky ones out of the rest of them. It wasn’t that his parents didn’t love him, he’d say to himself. It’s just that they didn’t really like him, and who could blame them?

“Me neither,” Stan says, his voice thick with some emotion Richie can’t place. He squeezes his eyes shut, and before Richie can open his mouth to say something, Stan says, “Did Beverly tell you?”

Richie blinks. “Tell me what?”

Stan sighs, and rubs his face, fingers sliding under his glasses. “She pulled me aside at the Inn yesterday. She told me that she didn’t see me when she was in the deadlights. She told me that she thought I had died.”

Richie takes a breath and holds it, before letting it slip out, long and slow, between his parted lips. 

“She said she’d seen it and everything. Saw me in a bathtub. Saw my wife come in. Saw an empty seat at our table that I never came to fill.” He rubs his face again, his shoulders cramping together, and sighs, and when he moves his hands, he looks more tired than Richie has ever seen him. 

“But you’re here now,” Richie says. “You’re here with all of us.”

Stan shakes his head. “Rich, you don’t…she was right. She was right.” His back bends, and he slumps forwards, his posture crumbling for one of the first times that night, and makes a noise in the back of his throat. “She was right.”

“Hey, woah,” Richie says, his voice soft, and rests his hand on Stan’s back. “You’re not dead, man, you’re right here. You’re right here with us.”

He shakes his head again. “When I got the call from Mike, I. I didn’t.” Stan inhales, and the breath breaks on the way out, and Richie feels his back tense under his hands like a rubber band pulled too tight. He presses his fists to his mouth, exhaling hard around it.

“Stanley,” Richie says, putting both hands on his back. “Stan, it’s alright. Deep breathing, okay? Breathe with me. You can do it.”

Stan shakes his head fast, and Richie huffs. “No, no, yeah, you can,” Richie says, and he does it, breathes in for five counts, lets it out for ten, and he whispers it under his breath until Stan does it too, his back rising, his chest puffing. Richie slips back to a memory, decades ago, of Richie and Stan in opposite positions, Richie curled up with his head on his knees in the boys bathroom, and Stan next to him, sitting cross legged on the floor and counting the seconds under his breath as he inhaled and exhaled. 

(“Where’d you learn that from?” Richie had asked.

“My cousin went to a psych ward after having a mental breakdown,” Stan said matter-of-factly. “She taught me it at our aunt’s wedding. She said people think she’s crazy when she does it, but it works so it doesn’t matter what they think.”)

When Stan looks up, Richie sees that his eyes are wet and wide, shiny with fear, like they were back in Neibolt. “When Mike called,” Stan starts again, his breath shivering with the effort to keep his voice steady, “It was too much. Not like it was for everyone else. I was different. I thought that, just knowing about everything that had happened, how unhappy and scared everyone was, knowing that we had to come _back_ and do it again, I thought that knowing that was going to kill me. I thought that, just knowing it all again, I was never going to be safe again. I was never going to be able to be a person again, and it terrified me."

Stan stares straight ahead at the plaster wall of the hospital waiting room, just below the window. “I talked myself through it for what felt like hours, and, I had made up my mind. I was going to kill myself. It felt like the most logical move forward, and the easiest way to make myself useful to the rest of us. I thought that if I were dead, I wouldn’t be there to be…deadweight. I would lighten the load.”

Richie says nothing as Stan takes another breath, only keep his hand on his back, trying to keep him from flying away. “This wasn’t some…idea in my head, or a possibility of what I was going to do, I was going to do it. I ran a bath, and I was going to…” He moves his hands, as if to mime something, but just waves them in the air. “I had a note and everything, Richie. I was ready.

“But I couldn’t stop thinking about the promise I had made—that _we_ had made—to Bill. And it broke me in two, because I knew that he had my word, that I would come back. I kept seeing his face in my brain, looking at me, when we made that blood oath. He believed I would come back. He _knew_ I would come back, he had that…complete and total faith in me. And I knew that I couldn’t do it for him. And in that moment, I was so…fucking angry at Bill, for making me promise that. For making me come back again and do everything all over, after we had already left, after I had this _life_ that I’d made for myself, despite everything. I hated him so much in that moment. I thought that remembering you all wasn’t worth it, because I was going to be in a living nightmare for the rest of my life, knowing what I knew.”

He stops talking, still staring straight ahead. Richie says, quietly, “So, what changed?”

“I remembered that you were all worth it,” Stan says. “And I couldn’t stop hearing your little kid voices in my head, telling me what a stupid idea this was. And the thing—” His words catch in his throat, and he closes his eyes, breathes in deeply. “The thing was. I still wanted to do it. It was so easy to slip back into it, and to _want_ it. The bathtub was still warm, the knife was still…In college, I had thought about the same things. Thought about how much smarter it’d be to take myself off the board, stop wasting my parent’s money, stop wasting people’s time. I didn’t suddenly regain the will to live, I just…realized that dying wasn’t the smartest option.” He shrugs. “So I didn’t do it.”

Richie looks at him. For once, he doesn’t know what to say, and knows that fumbling is not going to do anything for anyone, so he looks out the window, past the dirty glass and out into the deserted parking lot. 

“I, uh,” Richie says, and then clears his throat. “I won’t pretend to understand exactly what you’re going through, or what you feel. But, um, I love you. I’m glad you’re here.”

Stan’s jaw quivers, and it makes Richie feel like someone is pressing their heel into a spot just below his ribs. 

“You know it wouldn’t have been the same without you, right?”

Stan nods, wiping his eyes and sighing deeply. “I know. That’s why I didn’t do it.”

Richie nods, too, and then bites the inside of his cheek. “I…I almost. In freshman year, I was going to…you know.” He inhales shakily and looks to the side, at Beverly and Ben leaning against each other. “I tried to off myself. I almost did.” He feels Stan’s gaze on him, which makes him want to crawl under the chair and never speak again, but he keeps going. If Stan could do it, so can he. “I was just drunk and stupid. My roommate found me and he…called the ambulance, and stuff. I wasn’t, um. I was just passed out. I got alcohol poisoning. I was just being dumb.”

Despite himself, Richie laughs a little, scratching his chin. “The dumbest part was, though, like, maybe a week later, I was drunk and stupid again, and I almost did the same thing, and I was…like. Um. Better prepared. I guess. And then I remembered that there was a game coming out in four days that I wanted to play, so I just…went to bed. And then I woke up the next morning and went to class. Like, that was my reasoning, at the time. That there was this game I wanted to play that was coming out.” He laughs again. “And when I got the game, it wasn’t even that good. It fucking sucked. I don’t even remember what it was called. But every time after that, when I thought about it, it was like, oh, well, I have to go visit my sister next month, I have that standup set I was gonna see on Saturday, you know, just little things. And it wasn’t even on purpose. I just had things I wanted to do a little more than killing myself. It was more luck than anything else.

“But, you know,” he says hurriedly, squaring his shoulders, “I have better reasons now. Obviously. Five really good reasons.”

“ _Six_ really good reasons,” Stan says, almost not loud enough for Richie to hear him.

“Yeah, well. One of those reasons doesn’t really need me to depend on him right now, so.”

He and Stan sit in silence for a few minutes, and it’s almost impossible for Richie to not view as uncomfortable, even though he knows it’s not. When Stan leans his head, gently, on Richie’s arm, he lets out a long breath, deflating like an old balloon. 

“Well, now that I remembered you exist again, I’m really glad that you didn’t end up doing anything stupid,” Stan says. “I can’t imagine a world without you in it.”

Richie smiles. “Right back at you, Stanley.”

That’s where they sit for the rest of the night, listening to the clock tick, watching the sun creep up over the old pines and even older cars, flooding the pavement with light.

\----

In the time it takes for Eddie to wake up after his emergency surgery, Beverly is apparently already in the process of getting a divorce. Richie and Ben watch her outside the tiny hospital window, standing in the only part of the parking lot where there’s service, pacing in circles and talking sternly with someone on the phone. When she’s done, she looks up at the sky, looking like a mix of terrified and proud, and when she comes back in she goes straight to Ben, smiling at him so big that Richie almost always refrains from making loud gagging noises at them. Bill calls his wife a day into their stay, and sits in the parking lot for hours, just talking. When he comes back in, he immediately shakes his head the second Richie opens his mouth, sitting down on the chair opposite of Eddie’s bed and folding his arms.

They all spend the first night in the hospital room, but Beverly, Bill and Stan go back to the Inn to shower (something that Bev feels guilty about, to which Richie responds that she’s literally covered in blood, and she’s gonna get questioned by police or at least get a fuck ton of weird looks if she stays here longer than she already has, not everyone is gonna believe it’s mud, Bevvy), while he, Mike, and Ben stay there. Ben brings all of Richie’s meals to him—Pringles and orange soda from the snack machine, McDonald’s from the spot four blocks down, an orange that Richie peels and splits for all of them to share. They play Go Fish and War with the old deck that’s missing about six different cards and all look suspiciously damp, and Mike wins every fucking time because he’s an old man that thrives off of cards and board games and doesn’t watch TV. By some outward blessing, the hospital staff doesn’t seem to care that the three stay there that night, whether it’s from Mike’s sweet-talking or the strange assumption that they are all, collectively, Eddie’s blood relatives, Richie doesn’t know, but he takes it. He’s more exhausted than he’s ever been in his entire life, but he can’t sleep. He leans his head on the sheets near Eddie’s leg and watches the heart rate on Eddie’s monitor make it’s consistent, beeping path, until Bev rubs his back to let them know that they’re back the next morning. 

The amount of talking they all do as a group is minimal, probably because Richie is not trying to carry every conversation by pure force. Most of the talking they do is to Eddie, taking turns sitting in the chair next to Eddie’s bed, which probably now has a permanent indent of Richie’s ass on it. Ben whispers to him, like he’s telling him secrets, adjusting his sheets and wiping the sweat off of Eddie’s forehead with a damp cloth he swiped from the Inn. Stan talks to him like they’re at a board meeting, with his fists stacked on top of one another, asking “How are you, Eddie?” every time, pausing to wait for an answer before talking about his fascinating day of pacing around the hospital room and arguing about which TV shows to watch with Richie. Mike takes Eddie’s hand and rubs his knuckles with his thumb, telling him to take his time in waking up, that healing is a process, that they’re all here waiting for him, so intimately and gently that Richie has to leave every time Mike does it, going into the bathroom and trying not to have a panic attack. Bev tells him about the outfits she’s been designing for him on old takeout napkins, points out little details that can't be picked up by most. Bill doesn’t usually say much, just pats Eddie’s hand and tells him “Don’t worry, man, I won’t g-g-go on like the others do, we can just sit together,” and then does just that, sometimes for hours. 

Richie talks to him throughout the day, and does it the most in the rare moments when the other Losers aren’t there, walking around the room and critiquing the artwork on the walls, flipping through channels and describing each one to Eddie, giving him quips for him to bounce off of, if he wanted to. The doctors said that he wasn’t under medical sleep or anything. He had been healing miraculously quick, if anything (Mike took this information with a small, wry smile quirking at his mouth, like he wanted to jump up and say _I told you so_ , start pointing at the other Loser’s miraculously un-scarred hands and proving a theory he had been working on since he was thirteen), and was under morphine to keep the pain at bay. When the doctors had talked about how Eddie had acted when they brought him in, how he thrashed when they took his blood for the first time, how the last thing he had asked for before he went under was his inhaler, Richie had to stumble to the tiny, disgusting hospital bathroom to throw up. When they asked who Eddie’s next of kin was, they had all said nobody, or themselves, before the nurse had raised her eyebrows and asked about the wedding ring on his finger, to which nobody had an answer for. Eddie’s phone was dead and broken, caked with sewage and blood, and they all had sat there uncomfortably when doctors tried to pry and ask what happened. Mike and Bev concocted some passable story, going back and forth between themselves, describing a driving accident, a trip gone wrong, but they were workshopping it every day and adding new details, covering their tracks. 

It’s the fourth day that Richie is there, watching something on Nickelodeon, when Bev and Stan come up to them, arms crossed and hands on hips.

“Hey,” he says, eyebrows raised. “What’d I do this time?”

“You need a shower, Richie,” Stan says, quirking his mouth to the side. “You’ve been stewing and sweating in the same disgusting clothes you’ve had on since we left the Inn, and you’re literally stinking up the entire room. You can smell it outside the hall.”

Richie wrinkles his nose. “What? I don’t smell anything. Nobody’s said anything.”

“That’s because you look morbidly depressed, honey,” Bev replies, which makes Richie guffaw. 

“You have actual shit caked under your fingernails. I can’t take it anymore. I’m going to go crazy,” Stan says, voice serious.

“We don’t _know_ if it’s shit,” Richie mumbles. 

“That only makes it worse.”

“If you’re not going to do it for yourself, do it for Stan,” Bev says, raising her eyebrows at him. “He’s been talking about just throwing you in the trunk and dunking you in the quarry in the middle of the night, but I told him I could convince you.”

Richie rolls his eyes, but he knows she’s right; if any of them wanted Richie to do something, they would either tell Eddie to tell him not to do it, or tell Bev to ask him to do it. He’s never been able to say no to her because he knows she’ll actually be really disappointed in him if he doesn't listen to her, and not in a funny way. 

“When Eddie wakes up and sees you, he’s going to be disgusted. It would be the first thing he talked about, the second he woke up.” Stan quirks an eyebrow at him, and Richie knows he’s been had. He groans, getting up and feeling his whole body disagree with him on the way, bones that he didn't know he had creaking loudly. 

“Can someone at least be here with him,” Richie says, and doesn’t feel the need to add _by someone, I mean one of us._

“Richie,” Bev says, taking his hand in hers and looking at him in the face, in that unavoidable way she had mastered at such a young age, her eyebrows scrunched together but her eyes firm. “He’s going to be fine. He’s one of the only people on this floor, and he’s definitely the most interesting. His nurse is probably going to bring in some of her friends and say, ‘look, it’s the miracle man we’ve been talking about! Marvel at his healing flesh, his scarred cheek!’”

Richie smiles a little, his eyes crinkling. “I missed you so much,” he tells her.

She pats his cheek. “I can say the same to you when you actually shower.”

They squeeze their way into Stan’s itty bitty car, one of the infuriating little square ones, and Richie gets on his ass about it the entire way to the inn. The more he kvetched, the louder Stan turned up his folk music, until both Richie and Bev were yelling at him over the music, Richie telling him to turn it down and Bev telling him to change the music. When they get to the Inn, everyone is there, and all collectively look delighted to see him, but Bev and Stan herd him upstairs to the bathroom (steering clear of the _other_ bathroom, and Richie doesn’t have to play guessing games to know that’s where Eddie got stabbed). Bev stands guard outside the bathroom while Eddie digs through his suitcase in his room, grabbing the dumbass orange toiletry bag and some decent clothes. When Stan peaks his head in to throw the stuff in, he says something like “You packed two different Hawaiian shirts? Are you a fucking step-Uncle?” to which Richie replies to by throwing his washcloth at him. It’s the most like himself that Richie has felt like in four days, and he’s so immensely grateful for it that he can’t even pretend to be irritated. 

He takes a longer shower than what is probably strictly necessary, until his skin prickles with the searing heat of the water and his thumb gets just a little pruned, and he scrubs every inch of his body. He yells some joke out to Bev about getting to know his body a little better, discovering crevices untouched by man, which she boos at. Inwardly, he wonders if she took the line about “untouched by man” in a certain way and stops scrubbing to stare at the wall for a moment. _Well, if they didn’t know then, they certainly knew now,_ Richie thought wryly, going back to caking his hands in soap and rubbing his armpits for the third time, choosing to think about this later.

When Richie gets out and puts his clothes on, even trimming his nails with the cheap clippers he got at the airport two years ago, he glances at himself in the mirror and really looks at himself. His glasses are still cracked to hell, and he looks old and weird. _This is a person who helped kill an alien clown,_ he thinks, and immediately feels strange. _This is also a person who killed their childhood bully, who was about to kill one of their best friends,_ he thinks, which doesn’t have quite the effect the alien clown thing had, but it makes him feel…proud. He tilts his head this way and that, looking at himself, and is about to praise himself a little before realizing he can now, finally, take his testosterone again, and he almost whoops in relief before shucking off his jeans and taking the shot right there on the bathroom floor. 

He opens the door, ready to brag to Bev about being a new man, a two-in-one joke, before realizing the hallway is empty. Before he has anytime to even attempt to unreasonably panic, Bill rounds the corner, putting on his jacket, and stops to look at him. 

“Hey,” Bill says, out of breath, shucking his jacket on the rest of the way and checking his phone. “Come on, we gotta g-g-go.”

“Why, what?” Richie says, eyebrows raised. “Are we going out on the town or something?”

Bill shakes his head and looks at Richie with wide eyes. “Eddie's awake.”

\----

Before they all go into the room, they try to make some sort of frenzied effort to figure out the best way to talk to Eddie—Bev says they should be gentle with him, not pepper him with questions, Bill says that Eddie would rather be in a pseudo-coma again than be talked down to, which Richie privately agrees with—but it all goes out the window when Stan opens the door, apparently deciding he’s done with the conversation. There’s a doctor and a nurse already in there, the doctor flipping through something on his clipboard, the nurse fixing his bedspread. When she looks up, she raises her eyebrows at Richie, giving him a look, and Richie almost feels uncomfortable for how much this particular nurse has seen of him, before he looks at Eddie.

“Now, he’s still on Morphine,” the doctor says, but Richie doesn’t hear him. Eddie isn’t sitting up, or moving around, but he is squinting with furrowed eyebrows as he looks at the room around him, like he’s already judging the layout. His hair is mussed in the back, and he looks pale, his scar an angry pink, like it’s pissed to be on Eddie’s face, and Richie feels like bursting into tears again just seeing him, looking so much like himself. He’s kneading his scratchy hospital blanket like a cat, and Richie resists the urge to grab his hand like he did when Eddie was asleep. He already feels ready to jump out the fucking window, and Eddie hasn’t even spoken yet.

They all gather around Eddie’s bed, and Mike puts a hand on Eddie’s shoulder, smiling down at him. Eddie blinks, and squints a little more, tilting his head to look at them all. “Oh, there you are,” he says, his voice quiet and dry, and Richie gives a little hiccup of a laugh. He feels Ben clasp his shoulder, squeezing him. 

“Hey, buddy,” Mike says, the joy in his voice practically filling the room. “It’s great to see you again.”

“You look like shit,” Stan says, ignoring the look Bev shoots at him, and Eddie scrunches up his face before nodding a little, which makes Stan laugh. 

“How are you feeling?” asks Mike. “Do you need anything?”

“Water,” he mumbles, and then turns to Bill, squinting up at him. “Do you know where Myra is?”

“Myra?” asks Bill, and it’s a moment before collective realization passes over all of them. “Oh. Oh, your w-w-wife. Um.” He scratches the back of his neck. “We c-couldn’t, um, well.”

“Oh, okay,” Eddie nods, like that answers everything, and to prevent himself from running into the bathroom to dry heave into the sink, Richie gets a water bottle from the back and pours it into one of the little plastic cups hanging around. 

“Here you go, Eds,” Richie says, his voice cracking as he holds out the cup, willing his hands to not shake. Eddie’s fingers brush his as he takes it, sipping from it slowly. 

“It’s fantastic that he woke up,” Richie hears the doctor say. “His vital signs are improving greatly, and he should be able to get up and walking around in the next day or two.”

“When do you think he can leave?” Richie asks, shoving his hands in his pockets, jostling his leg. 

“I would say in maybe, four days time? Maybe a little longer, to get him off the Morphine. He’s going to need some medications for the pain, and plenty of bed rest at home.” The nurse looks up at them. “I think one of you mentioned he has a file here, but I just wanted to check—does he have any known allergies?”

While the six of them collectively try to figure out how to answer that question, Richie hears Eddie make a noise, and he spins around to look at him, wondering if Eddie is going to sit up and answer the question himself. His eyes are closed again, his eyebrows furrowed, and he mumbles something.

“Hey, Eds,” Richie says, moving back to his bedside, sitting back in that old chair he was glued to for four days. “Speak up, we’re all old and our ears aren’t as sharp as they used to be.”

Eddie’s mouth quirks to the side, looking like he’s about to smile or start yelling, and he says, “Richie, honey,” before not saying anything else, his eyes closed and breathing steady. 

Richie gets up and walks out of the door, ignoring Bev calling for him. He tries to control his breathing as he turns a corner, inhaling tightly through his nose, but all that does is make him want to start gasping, which he can’t do, in a hospital, in his home town, full of people that either already hate him or will once they find out who he is, who already think he’s fucking crazy for sitting in the same hospital chair next to some unconscious man for four straight days. He makes his way to the big window with the air vent below it, the one he would go to when he was tired of looking at the parking lot, and he presses his head against it, breathing hard, fogging up the glass.

He doesn’t know how long he stands there for before someone touches his shoulder and he jumps like a cat. “It’s just me,” says Stan’s voice, and he relaxes by an inch, and turns around to see him, just to be sure. And it is him, standing there, looking at Richie like he’s a wild animal. 

“If Bev told you to get me, I’m really not fucking interested in having a conversation about “confronting my feelings” or whatever,” he says, in one nasty breath. He knows he’s not being fair, but really doesn’t care enough to stop and try being nice.

Stan frowns. “Bev didn’t tell me to do anything, and when have I ever volunteered to talk about our ‘feelings’ together?” he asks, making air quotes with his hands.

Richie grits his teeth and faces the window. “Great, awesome. So, tell me how you’re going to fix me up, Professor Uris, I’m dying to know. Give me the Stanley Breakdown of how _you_ think I should fix _my_ panic attack over my formerly dying friend making some stupid comment at me while he's on Morphine, please, enlighten me.”

“Stop it,” Stan says, his voice harsh. “Don’t be cruel for cruelties sake. That’s not you.”

Richie keeps breathing, keeps clenching his fists so hard his nails start digging in, but he knows he’s right. He wants to make a stupid joke about what Eddie said, wants to laugh about it like he should've back in the hospital room, but the words don't come, stuck inside the hollow of his throat. He wishes, desperately, for a drink, and feels so stupid for even thinking that he feels like screaming. He wishes he could say he doesn’t know what’s wrong with him, but he knows exactly what’s wrong with him. He’s incapable of being happy without ruining it, incapable of just being grateful for the things that are given to him. He’s been greedy his whole life, running his mouth just to fill the silence and wanting everyone’s eyes on him at all times, so selfish and self-serving that it made him sick to look in the mirror for too long. And he knows this, he _knows_ this, but instead of owning up to anything, he runs like a fucking coward.

He feels Stan move closer to him, not touching him, but after a moment he hears him breathing deep, counting under his breath, and that’s when he bursts into tears. Stan doesn’t freak out, or try to get him to stop, but he puts his hand on Richie’s back and rubs at the back of his spine while Richie cries like it’s being beaten out of him.

“I don’t want to be like this,” he says through his teeth. “I don’t want to be this person.”

“Be what person?” Stan asks, his voice gentle in a way it so rarely ever is. “A person with feelings and emotions?”

“I can’t go two hours without crying now. I don’t know what happened. I was really good at bottling it up, and now I’m in fucking pieces every other day.”

“I know,” Stan says. “It’s reasonable. We’re all in pieces.”

Richie shakes his head. “Not like me. Not like how I am.”

“Richie,” Stan says, and Richie can hear him raising his eyebrows, “If you think you’re the most emotionally compromised out of all of us, I have some really good news for you.”

Richie barks out a laugh, even as he keeps crying, rubbing his hands under his glasses. 

“Everyone’s just worried about why you left,” Stan says, his voice quiet again. “You know we don’t care if you cry. It’s you running out that confused us.”

Richie shakes his head again. When he breathes in, his breath stutters in his lungs. “I didn’t want Eddie to see me,” he says.

“Eddie has also seen you crying, Richie.”

“Not that,” he grits out. “I didn’t want him to see me like this. I didn’t—I didn’t want him to know or remember that I was different with him, and I always was, and I can’t stop. He’s going to see this _thing_ overflowing out of me because I can’t stop it, I can’t ever stop it, and he’s never going to want anything to do with me ever again, and I cannot fucking live with myself knowing that I lost his friendship because I don’t know how to fucking _control myself._ ”

For a moment, it’s just the sounds of the hospital, the cold air from the vent below hitting Richie’s chin. Then Stan’s arm moves to his side, and he pulls Richie into a hug. Richie, feeling so embarrassed that he can barely breathe, crushes Stan to his chest and cries into his hair anyway, like they’re ten years old again and Richie just finished watching some movie where the dog died and he bawls into Stan’s shoulder, while Stan pats his back and says “there, there,” in his little monotone fourth-grade voice that has never once changed. 

After he’s finally exhausted himself, he pulls back, wiping his nose with the back of his hand. Stan’s glasses are crooked, and the sides of his mouth are quirked up just a little as he glances up at Richie, looking fondly exasperated. “Are you done?” he asks, not unkindly.

Richie nods, sniffing loudly. “At least for the next two hours. I might need to get snot all over your shirt again, I dunno.”

Stan rolls his eyes, and then folds his arms, looking serious again. “Do you want my advice?”

“Um,” Richie scrunches his face up, already imagining how Stan would advise him on how to Best Deal with his Feelings. “Not particularly."

Stan rolls his eyes a second time for good measure, and sighs. “Fine, alright. I’ll keep my advice to myself. But at least talk to the others about it.”

“What, that I’m in love with Eddie or that I’m gay?” he blurts, like it’s a dare, and then shuts his mouth tight.

Stan doesn’t even flinch. “Either is fine. I feel like they go kind of hand in hand, though, so you don’t have to plan separate conversations.”

“Christ, man,” Richie laughs, genuine and loud, running his hand through his still damp hair. “You should just give me a script to read since you’ve got the whole thing planned out already. I can use it in my new standup routines.”

“Oh, joy,” Stan says dryly, but still smiles, which makes Richie grin, even when his face is still wet from crying.

“I love you, you know,” he says. “All of you. More than anything.”

“I know,” Stan says. “We love you, too. We want to help you sometimes, too.”

Richie shrugs at that, with one shoulder, pressing his hands into his pockets, to which Stan says, a little sterner, “Don’t give me that. You’re an asshole, but you’re _our_ asshole, and if you keep bottling yourself up like a Molotov cocktail, Mike is going to stage an intervention and make you go on a therapist retreat or something, and nobody wants that.”

Richie laughs a little, but still nods. “Okay,” he says.

“Alright,” Stan replies, and nods his head, like he’s putting a check mark in his head on his to do list, right next to _stop Richie’s inevitable breakdown_ , and says, “Are you ready to go back?”

“I am,” Richie says, and is surprised to know that he means it.

\----

When Richie and Ben decide to drive together in Ben’s _very nice_ Lexus to the quarry, Richie is expecting small talk, chatter about how happy they are, how good it’ll be to see each other all together, maybe tease each other’s taste in music, but instead when Richie shuts his door, Ben turns to him and says, “So. Eddie?”

“Oh, god,” Richie says, sliding down in the pleather seats, “Jesus. Are we really doing this?”

Ben turns the key in the ignition, smile tugging at his lips, the bastard. “Not if you don’t want to,” he says, “But I think we’re kind of in the same position.”

“Oh,” Richie says stupidly, remembering. “Right.”

Ben nods and smiles, pulling out of the parking lot. Richie knows that he’s not gonna make him talk about this, not if Richie doesn’t want to, and it makes it hard to lie and say he doesn’t want to.

“What’s your guys’ plan? You and Bev, I mean,” Richie clarifies, though he knows he doesn’t need to. It just feels good to have their names together, after so long.

Ben frowns a little, scratching his beard. “I honestly don’t know. She’s trying to wrangle things with lawyers, and I asked if I should be involved, but she wants to keep it to herself.” He shrugs. “I just know that she doesn’t want to be in the place where she is anymore, and that…she loves me.” The smile comes back onto his face, warm and sunny, and Richie feels himself smiling, too. 

“I’m really happy for you,” Richie says honestly. “You guys deserve it. You deserve to be happy.”

“Thanks, Rich. So do you,” he adds, eyeing Richie as he turns left.

After a moment, Richie asks, “How did you know I…?”, his voice small, and immediately feels ridiculous. If it wasn’t for how he acted in Neibolt, or how he acted in the emergency room, or how he acted immediately after Eddie woke up, it was in everything he did after all of that. Everyone was ecstatic, the hospital room bustling with life and laughter that had been absent the first four days of their stay, bringing piles of flowers and candy and cards to Eddie from drugstores nearby, but Richie knew that he stuck out the most. He felt like a brand spanking new person, and for the past five days he’d sleep at the Inn at midnight and come back in at eight in the morning, an ungodly hour for him, but worth it to see Eddie sipping apple juice with a straw out of those little containers, or flipping through the channels on the shitty TV, or wrangling the remote for his bed. He hung around him all day, playing cards and showing him annoying videos on Twitter that he knows Eddie will hate, tells long stories about the boring exploits of hospital life before he woke up. He steals part of Eddie’s chocolate when he pretended to think he wasn’t looking, and reveled in him yelling at him for it, yanking the bar away and setting it far out of his reach, looking deeply offended. He went to bed everyday with his face sore from smiling. He’d probably looked like a cartoon character with hearts swirling above its head. 

Ben, sweet Benny, only shrugs and smiles again. “I know a fellow romantic when I see one.”

Richie closes his eyes, leans against the window, and lets the gentle rumble of the car fill the soft silence until they pull to a stop, rocks crunching beneath the wheels. Ben doesn’t need to say where they are. Richie knows the paths around this town inside and out, could sometimes find himself biking them at night when he dreamed in the Inn, leaning into the turns and splashing over puddles. 

When he gets out, he sees that they’re at the lower part of the quarry, looking untouched from when they were last here, decades ago. The water was still a serene sort of green, some combination of chemicals and algae, Mike always said, and the cliffs and rocks surrounding the quarry were lit up brown and gold from the afternoon sun, like a big, rocky fish bowl. The others are there, too, and they all look at them as they walk to the shore. The ground dipped down into soft, soggy mud, something Eddie had always hated when they were little, cringing and whining at the feeling of mud squishing between their toes, but when you got out far enough, the bottom was all sand and rocks, perfect on calloused little kid feet. It seemed so magical, so beyond the reach of anyone or anything they knew, and now that they were older, Richie saw it for what it was—just a quarry with a high cliff above it. And, somehow, he still loved it.

Richie raises his eyebrows at Eddie. “Well?” He said. “Are you gonna jump in first, or what?”

Eddie’s eyebrows raised to comical degrees, and before he could even start chewing Richie out, he’s cut off by a loud whoop from behind them, as Bev runs past and stumbles face first into the water, with her clothes still on and everything. 

“Hey!” Eddie yells. “You’re gonna get yourself filthy! Do you have any idea what’s in that fucking water?!” 

“Did you really think we were gonna come here and I was just _not_ going to go in the water?” Bev yells, and she flings herself backwards, her bare feet kicking her back, laughing like Richie hasn’t heard her laugh since they got here. 

“Oh, whatever,” Mike says, and he kicks off his shoes and his jacket before going in, too, to join her, and after that it was just a matter of who could scramble off their watches and phones and shoes and jump in after them. 

Richie isn’t going to pretend like being in lukewarm water in jeans and a t-shirt is anything other than uncomfortable, but he doesn’t care. He shoves Ben under and tries to swim down and scare Bev, but she knows it’s him and yanks him up to laugh at him. He jumps on Mike’s shoulders, climbing him like a jungle gym, though they’re practically the same height, and he yelps when Mike falls back to dunk Richie in. Bill spends five full minutes explaining the rules of a splash war that only he remembers from when they were kids, until Mike gets board and starts splashing him first, and then they’re kicking and squealing like animals, Richie cackling loudly as he gets a mouthful of quarry water.

Eddie hobbles in, carefully, scrunching up his face at the feeling of mud between his toes, and something about the way he sneaks in and then dives under, yelling about his stitches and how they’re going to pay for any hospital bills if they get infected, is so painfully Eddie it makes Richie’s heart crack open, spilling all over, staining his mouth and hands when he pulls Eddie in deeper. 

After a minute, Richie looks back towards the shore, and sees Stan standing there, arms folded, his expression unreadable. Without even thinking, Richie paddles to the shore and walks up, his body weighed down by his soaked clothes.

“Hey,” he gasps, shaking his hair like a dog. “What are you doing?”

Stan purses his lips and doesn’t look at him, instead staring out at everyone in the quarry, at Bev spitting water at Mike, which makes Eddie yell louder, but laugh all the same. 

“Stan,” he says, and some of his heart must be in his voice, because Stan looks over at him, like a spell being broken. “Come in, man.”

For a moment, Richie thinks he’s going to get told off, but Stan kneels down and unties his shoes, slides off his socks, and carefully takes his shirt off to fold it, as Richie hoots and hollers, clapping as annoyingly as he can. When he takes off his glasses, he looks so much younger, his eyes crinkled around the edges, his hair a curled mess, and all Richie can do is beam at him. 

“Race you there,” Stan says in one breath, before bolting into the water, collapsing into it, the green swallowing him until all Richie can see is his floppy set of curls, turning around to look at Richie and yell at him for being too slow.

He goes back in, and they play together for what feels like hours. The sun is big on the horizon, almost red in the late afternoon sky, but a breeze cuts through the humidity, making the air fresh. They swim out to the center of the quarry, where they’re tall enough now that they can stand easily, and Richie kneels and presses his feet into the sand, searching for prints where their little kid feet had been before. With their faces wet and red with joy, the others look like totally different people, ridiculous and old, and just seeing them through the wet lenses of his cracked glasses makes Richie feel like he’s a well being tapped into, overflowing, relearning the love that he held inside him when he was little, taking it as his own. Everyone cries a little, even Eddie, even Stan, and they gather around one another in the water and hold each other, for as long as they need to, for as long as they want. Richie has a wild thought of _I get to know them again for the rest of my life,_ and he smiles, keeping it to himself, for once, holding it close to his chest. When they part, it’s only so that Richie can yell at Stan to play chicken with him again, his voice echoing so loud on the walls of the quarry that he can almost hear himself at twelve years old, defiant and full of life, yelling right back at him-- _Come on, Stanley, just one more time! Come on!_


End file.
